An Irishwoman's Diary

The new principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra has just told me that he rarely listens to classical music. Maybe I'm dreaming. Surely I wouldn't doze off in the middle of an interview?

"Yeah," the cool young man on the red sofa is saying. "At the moment I'm listening to a young Dublin band called Director, two of whom are students of mine in DIT. What else? Antony and the Johnsons. The Black-Eyed Peas. The Chieftains - the album they did with Simon and Garfunkel and the Stones. And quite a bit of Haydn, because I'm doing a PhD on performance practice in 18th-century orchestral music with particular reference to Haydn.

"I find," he adds nonchalantly, "huge similarity between Haydn and Coldplay, actually." Well - quite. Eh? But just as I suspect a serious wind-up, David Brophy is explaining - with perfect seriousness - that he has been studying the middle-period Haydn symphonies.

"He writes in sonata form, where there's a first and second subject in the opening section," he says. "But he actually gives prominence to just one of the ideas. The second idea is only barely there. Then he spends the rest of the symphony reversing around so that at the end, you only remember the second subject.

"Coldplay do that a lot with their songs on the album X and Y, where you get a riff at the beginning and then they give you one bar of a taster of the riff you'll get at the end. It's a very similar arc. Now, I'm not saying Coldplay were influenced by Haydn. But I think maybe there's something inherent in humans, that we construct music in that particular way. . ."

Few classical musicians would put Haydn and Coldplay in the same sentence. Even fewer would be familiar with the workings of the album X and Y. Brophy shrugs. "I hear parallels all the way across musics," he says. At a concert of early music in DIT last week, he heard a recorder piece and assumed it was a traditional Irish melody. He was later told it was by the Italian violinist Geminiani. "And that made absolute sense, because Geminiani lived here. He met Turlough O'Carolan. He's buried in that church in Suffolk Street which is now the tourist centre. See, in music all the lines break down for me - and eventually it's very hard to hear the lines at all.

"If you take all the people on the planet who listen to all different sorts of music, they're all actually looking for the same thing - something that connects to them in some way. Whether they're listening to Shaun Davey or Shostakovich, they're all searching for a unique voice, something that can only be said through music."

In this spirit - or, more likely, because of it - Brophy has worked with the National Chamber Choir and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, with Eleanor McEvoy and Shaun Davey. He has conducted Mozart's Magic Flute and André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire. His own compositions have been performed at the Belfast Sonorities festival. From 2001 to 2004 he worked as the first assistant conductor of the RTÉ NSO, and last month he was appointed principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra for the next three years.

"I'm thrilled to work with a band that just plays absolutely everything," he says. "It's great."

When Brophy was growing up in Dublin there was no classical music in his house at all. When he left school, he says, he discovered this music in a major way, buying all the classical CDs he could lay hands on and going to as many concerts as he could. "And then when I hit 30," he says, "I thought, 'Right. Am I going to spend the rest of my life just listening to one little section of all the music that there is?' It's as if you were going to spend your whole life eating Italian food. And I said, 'No. I'm going to go back to the music I listened to in my teens.' I left it behind when I went to college because I felt I had so much to learn."

We do like to put music into boxes, though - don't we? "Yeah, well, it becomes a bit clubby then, doesn't it? I think the 21st century will possibly be the one where the boxes will start to dissipate a little bit. More and more, there will be people who will be happy to listen to classical music - whatever that is - and then they'll go to jazz and they'll go to trad. My big problem is that people call classical music elitist - which it just isn't. Or if it is, it's as elitist as jazz and trad.

"I mean, if somebody was to come into the concert hall with 24-eyelet Doc Martens and tattoos and a long black leather jacket they might turn a few heads, right? But if there's a gig in the Sugar Club tonight and a man in his mid to late seventies walks in with a tweed jacket and a shirt and tie on, he'll probably garner similar sorts of looks. I think across the board there's a feeling of 'This is our club, our music, and we want it to belong to us'. And I think that's a pity."

David Brophy will conduct the opening and closing concerts in the RTÉ Concert Orchestra's spring series at the RDS. The Thursday-night concerts, on February 22nd, March 22nd and April 19th, will feature violinist Catherine Leonard, flautist Emer McDonough and pianist Hugh Tinney in music by Mozart, Bach, Rameau - and Haydn. Check it out, Coldplay fans.